@NeverDie said:

How good is VoxCommander as compared to Amazon Echo?

I am the creator of VoxCommando so I can't really answer this objectively, and anyway I have never used an echo, but based on what my users have described the echo wins in two obvious ways. 1 - The microphone is very good for speech recognition and does a good job of filtering out undesirable sound and homes in on your voice when you speak. 2- It's easy to set up, at least if you want to use it the way Amazon intended.

On the other hand VoxCommando should be able to offer vastly superior options in terms of flexibility and it's designed to be customized by users, so in that sense, it may be easier to set up if you want to do anything interesting. It works with a lot of multimedia programs and home automation stuff etc.

http://voxcommando.com/home/features/

You can try it for free and decide for yourself if you like it. It can do many many things, so there is a learning curve but most people find it fun to use once they get over the initial hump (I think).

Also of note, VC does not require an internet connection and does not upload your audio and other data to "big brother" the way the Echo does. For this reason it is probably also much faster.

In theory it should be possible to create something very similar to VoxWav (which runs on Android) for the RasPi. It streams PCM audio to VoxCommando and can either be triggered by a button or when the input volume goes above a certain threshold. People have talked about creating something like this for the RasPi but noone has done it yet and I don't personally have any experience with the RasPi. I can offer assistance to anyone who wants to work on it though. I have some sample code written in Java that I use in the VoxWav app that should help. It shows how to send the audio by TCP.